DALLAS, TX.- This month the Dallas Museum of Art began construction on the first redesign of the Museum’s Arts of Africa Gallery in nearly twenty years. The galleries will remain closed throughout the summer, with the unveiling of the redesigned gallery and a new installation opening in September 2015, featuring more than 200 works from the Museum’s acclaimed African art collection.

Research for the reinstallation project, which was sponsored by the Texas Fund for Curatorial Research and overseen by Roslyn Adele Walker, Ph.D., Senior Curator of the Arts of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific and The Margaret McDermott Curator of African Art, began in 2011 and included visits to national and international museums.

The reconfigured gallery will enable the Museum to display a larger number of works from the collection, including well-known works such as Olowe of Ise’s Kneeling Female Figure with Bowl, alongside recent acquisitions and works that have previously never been on view, including a State Sword by the Asante people of Ghana; a large-scale Yoruba arugba Shango, a caryatid figure holding a container for Shango ritual objects, from Nigeria; and a pair of Fulani six-inch hammered gold earrings. The DMA was an early advocate for the inclusion of African art in American art museums, and the Museum’s dedication to the field has set precedents since the 1950s. The collection is particularly strong in art from the Kongo and Luba cultures in Central Africa and the Yoruba and Edo (Benin kingdom) in West Africa.

In 2009 the Dallas Museum of Art published The Arts of Africa, its first catalogue of African art, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of its acclaimed collection of nearly 2,000 objects. The richly illustrated 320-page book was written by Dr. Walker.